After Caeden kicked Erik and Cat out of the Forge, he could finally turn his full attention to his collapsing soul. He hoped that his experience watching Cat work on Erik’s problems and assisting her in removing the last piece of the founder’s influence would help him with his own recovery.

That turned out to be true, in a sense. Seeing Cat’s work was helpful, but only in understanding how different his own situation was. It only took a moment of true focus to realize that his and Erik’s situations were incomparably different.

If he were to put it in words, the difference between what happened to his and Erik’s souls would be the difference between two tapestries. With one, Erik’s, someone had picked loose a few specific threads, removing them carefully to make sure they weren’t damaged. No consideration was given for the integrity of the tapestry itself, only the threads. But the process was at least gentle, since the taker wanted something out of the tapestry.

By comparison, Caeden’s situation was having someone rip his tapestry off the wall with a battle axe before dousing it in oil and setting it on fire. Then throwing the burning remains in a raging forge for good measure. The founder had been trying to deliberately destroy Caeden’s soul.

As far as he could tell, the founder had essentially succeeded. Caeden wasn’t so much holding his soul together as he was grasping at the last remaining threads left over and trying to smother the flames with his bare hands. Normally, such a thing would be impossible, and Caeden didn’t doubt that if he set foot outside the Forge, he’d die again immediately. And permanently.

The only reason he was alive was because of his special relationship with his shroud and domain. His consciousness and body were held together in the Forge, no matter the condition of his soul. Which, from what Cat had explained about souls, meant that his soul was actually gone, just in an irreparable state. Apparently, so long as the body lived, the soul couldn’t truly die. Though the inverse was not true, a body could die while the soul lived. In fact, that was the normal state of things. The body died and the soul continued on unaffected.

Caeden was sitting in the inverse situation, losing his soul while his body was forcefully sustained by the infinite energy contained within his domain. By all rights, he should be dead, but the laws of existence dictated that a body must have a soul so long as it lived. And so he wasn’t dead.

“I’m sitting on the knife’s edge, aren’t I?” Caeden murmured into the empty space around him. “This is going to be much more difficult than I thought.”

Looking at the mess before him, Caeden was stumped. He was inexperienced with souls, and didn’t have anything like the intuitive understanding that Cat did. Worse, the base of his soul was essentially gone. He was holding an amorphous cloud of soulstuff that used to be him, but wasn’t really anything anymore.

Feeling around the cloud with his senses, Caeden could identify nothing. There was no remainder of his former soul sitting within, nothing for him to build off of, no scrap of thread left of the tapestry that he used to be. It had all gone up in smoke. That was what he was holding, he realized. The smoke left over after a soul burned away.

He contemplated for a moment, feeling something in between sadness and ambivalence. He had lost his soul, and he saw no way to ever get it back. But at the same time, he was fine. He felt no ill effects, no pain or discomfort. The Forge kept him in peak condition, even now. It was hard to feel the loss, even if he could see it.

Thinking about it, that struck him as odd more and more. How was he fine? He was holding onto the burnt remains of his soul through sheer force of will and the power granted to him by his domain, but he felt nothing? That seemed impossible, even with the Forge. If nothing of him remained, then nothing remained. He could actually be alive and dead at the same time.

Looking at the soul smoke, Caeden once again remembered Cat’s lessons on souls. Living things had to have souls to be alive. He was alive so long as he was in the Forge. But what he was holding wasn’t a soul. It couldn’t be. It was just an amorphous mass that used to be a soul. Those weren’t the same thing.

“I could be wrong but…This isn’t what’s keeping me alive, is it?” Caeden whispered. Before he did anything hasty, Caeden took the chance to hone his senses on the soul plane, to feel the intricacies of the cloud of substance he gripped with his will.

He wanted to make absolutely certain that there was nothing in this cloud that felt familiar. Unfortunately, the answer hadn’t changed in the slightest from his last inspection. It was a uniform cloud with nothing distinguishing it from the bits of material he could sense passing through the soul plane all around his cloud. He was holding nothing.

“Well, here goes.” Caeden braced, and then let go. The cloud drifted away, the remains of what used to be his soul. And nothing changed. He was just as fine as he’d been a moment ago. That was the final proof.

“So, I’m a body and mind without a soul.” Caeden sighed. What little he knew indicated that his current situation was impossible. “So, I’m dead? Or something like it?”

But that didn’t seem right either. Caeden had felt his body in the Starry Sea die. It was a particular sensation that his body in the Forge hadn’t experienced. So this body was alive, without a soul. If he was going to fix this problem, Caeden needed to figure out how that was possible.

What followed was an extended length of time where Caeden simply experimented and tested, trying to better understand his current state and learn something more about souls in general. Without the aggressive temporal acceleration inside the Forge, Caeden could have never hoped to make any progress in a reasonable time frame. His senses could barely touch the soul plane, and extending his control there was a tedious and draining affair. He might have infinite power inside the Forge, but reaching beyond it created a sort of fatigue he’d never experienced before.

Frustratingly, everything he did only added to his confusion. The concept of distance didn’t exist inside the soul plane, so with a little creative application of his senses, Caeden could touch other universes, to see the souls there and try to better understand them. Funnily enough, trying to find the Starry Sea was impossible. No doubt this was part of the researcher’s efforts to quarantine his home universe, but Caeden couldn’t find it on the soul plane. It was as if it didn’t exist.

All his other explorations collaborated with Cat’s original statement. A living being needed a soul. The soul was the motive force, it added a dimensional rigidity and solidity to one’s consciousness. Without a soul, living creatures were ripped apart by forces beyond the physical in moments. It was an engine that drove them and a shell that protected them all at once.

Eventually, after finding nothing to explain his situation, Caeden had to abandon his original hypothesis as impossible. He had to have a soul, even now. Even though he couldn’t feel it anymore. There was no other explanation. Somehow, his soul had to be hidden from his senses. If not, he’d be dead.

At this point, Caeden felt like he was grasping at straws. He couldn’t begin to imagine how his soul could exist without him being able to sense it, but even that seemed more likely than him not having one at all. So, he started poking around himself, internally and externally. But he immediately ran into an unexpected complication.

“Ugh, my body’s so closely entwined with the underpinnings of the Forge, I can hardly tell them apart.” Caeden complained to the empty space around him. He was starting to get lonely in a way he hadn’t experienced since his first time trapped in the Forge. Going through the same isolation again did not make it easier, just more familiar.

The interference from the Forge turned out to be an impassable obstacle, no matter how hard he tried. Even in the soul plane, the presence of the Forge was a burning brilliance, comparable to the Pillar back in the Starry Sea.

“What’s the Forge doing on the soul plane anyway!” Caeden yelled in frustration. “It’s not even a soul! The only reason it would…Huh.”

Thinking back, Caeden recalled a conversation with the researcher. One where the being had stated that all domains essentially existed on their own planes, rubbing up against the material plane. There was no reason why Caeden should feel the Forge on the soul plane.

“I’m so dumb.” Caeden sighed, covering his face with a hand. “How could I miss this?”

Caeden had found his soul. When his original soul was destroyed, the Forge saved him, as it was wont to do. And it did that by creating a reflection of itself on the soul plane. Since a large part of the Forge was Caeden, it worked to replace his original soul just fine. In fact, the Forge had always been much more than Caeden, being an entire domain. If he went digging, Caeden had no doubt he’d find a copy of his original soul buried among the mass of soul substance the Forge had created.

Knowing how he survived, and that it wasn’t something that was suddenly going to change, eased Caeden’s mind, but it didn’t offer any solutions to his current problem. Caeden still couldn’t leave the Forge without dying. Fortunately, he now had a jumping off point.

The idea of digging through the pseudo-soul the Forge had made to find a version of his original soul crossed Caeden’s mind. But he almost instantly discarded it. He was not so skilled with souls in the first place, and nowhere near skilled enough to pick apart the tangle of brilliant souls stuff that nearly blinded his senses.

Rather, he needed to make a new soul for himself, using the Forge as a reference and base to get it done. Even that was easier said than done. After spending so long staring at the soul plane and doing his best to pick things apart, Caeden could at least grab hold of a few bits of soul flotsam that seemed ever-present on that plane. These bits and bobs were the building blocks of a soul, and would have to form the basis of his new soul. But Caeden had very little idea of where to start.

First, he just tried emulating a few examples from other universes. It wouldn’t be perfect, nor the result he wanted, since those examples couldn’t hold shrouds. But it was good practice. At least, that was the idea. One that didn’t pan out when his every attempt immediately collapsed on itself without any warning.

Trial and error reveal a few answers to his failures. The most obvious problem was that a soul needed a physical reference point to fully form. Caeden learned this by watching the souls of hundreds of newborns. The soul started forming when the child was conceived, and finalized when they were born. But if the child died before their body could sustain itself, then the soul collapsed, much like his attempts. That similarity clued him in.

Once a soul was fully mature, it could survive separation from a physical anchor, but it needed one during formation. And this problem was simple to solve. After all, Caeden was a physical medium. He just had to make the connections. Those results held together longer, but would break in a dozen different ways for different reasons.

Ages passed, and Caeden kept iterating, learning more and more, and refining both his soul senses and his control. The better he got, the worse he felt. The memory of Cat’s actions in Erik’s soul never left him, and he was still a stumbling child confronted with a master artist in comparison. Cat deserved far more credit for her skills than he’d ever given her.

Still, progress was made. He couldn’t throw together a self-sustained soul as easily as breathing like Cat could, but his cobbled-together results started looking less cobble-together. After a truly embarrassing amount of time and effort, Caeden reached a plateau.

He could make as perfect a soul as any he’d seen, a replica of his original. That was where he ran into a point of failure that he couldn’t budge. Shrouds. Shrouds were a part of the soul. But Caeden had no idea how they connected to a newly-born soul. And he couldn’t begin to fathom how to connect existing shrouds to a new soul in a functional way. And because of the researcher’s defenses, the Starry Sea’s soul plane was hidden to him. He couldn’t cheat and look at some examples.

That was when Caeden started picking apart the soul-mass made by the Blade Forge with a more discerning eye. That turned out less helpful than he’d hoped, the dense mass still impenetrable to him. But it did net one possible avenue forward.

There was a single strand of substance running off of the mass, off into the distance. Following it, Caeden found what he would have expected if he’d thought for a moment. The strand led off the soul plane, and to another plane entirely. The domain of Physical Enhancement was on the other end. The Forge had managed to maintain Caeden’s connection to his other shroud.

It was the breakthrough he’d needed. Observing that connection let him peak at specific parts of the soul-mass with a better idea of what he was looking at. Finally, Caeden could just barely make out a version of his original soul in that mass. The site left a bitter taste in his mouth. This version of his soul was an integral part of the Blade Forge. Removing it wasn’t an option, or likely even possible at all.

With the example, Caeden could start playing around with methods of incorporating his shrouds back into his self-created soul. A lot of iterating and more than a little brute-force trial and error later, he had learned more. He couldn’t get anything to work, but not for that reasons he’d expected.

When he first started, Caeden had assumed the highest difficulty would be with getting the shrouds to latch onto his soul, seeing as this was one aspect of shrouds that even the researcher had trouble understanding. The process of how and why a shroud would attach to an infant soul was still a mystery.

Fortunately, Caeden skipped that whole problem. His soul had already held two shrouds, and these two, specific shrouds, before. A little finagling had the newly-created soul taking in the shrouds with ease. That wasn’t the issue. At that point, Caeden thought he was done, the soul was complete.

Instead, Caeden had a completely unexpected problem. Every time his new soul tried to finalize and solidify, connecting to his body within the Blade Forge, a resonance would form between the new soul and the soul-mass that was currently sustaining him. That was painful. The first time it happened, Caeden was stunned. He’d never felt pain while in the Forge before.

The resonance built and built, both the soul and soul-mass shaking harder and harder. Eventually one would break. And the soul, being smaller and less solidly rooted, was always the one to lose out. It would shake apart, destroying itself.

At this point, Caeden was fed up. His existing basis and a new soul seemingly couldn’t coexist. As it was, the soul-mass sustaining him also trapped him in the Forge.

“Well,” Caeden’s voice sounded unfamiliar to his own ears. He’d stopped talking out loud several decades worth of time ago. The sound of actual words just reminded him how alone he was, and he preferred to keep himself focused on the task at hand. Any other thoughts just made him depressed.

“I guess there’s only one solution. Can’t change the soul, tried that. So many times. So I just need to change the Forge.”

That was the only solution Caeden could see. The soul-mass rejected all attempts to let Caeden sync with a new soul. So Caeden needed to change the soul-mass to stop the rejection. But the soul-mass was based on the Forge and refused to budge. So, Caeden needed to change the Forge. And really, there was only one way to do that.

Caeden needed to evolve his shroud. Again.